The ideal of brotherhood of man, the building of the Just City, is one that cannot be discarded without lifelong feelings of disap...pointment and loss. But, if we are to live in the real world, discard it we must. Its very nobility makes the results of its breakdown doubly horrifying, and it breaks down, as it always will, not by some external agency but because it cannot work.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its p...eculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

It is not a certain conformity of manners that the painting of Van Gogh attacks, but rather the conformity of institutions themsel...ves. And even external nature, with her climates, her tides, and her equinoctial storms, cannot, after van Gogh's stay upon earth, maintain the same gravitation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Left to itself the masculine imagination has very little appreciation for the here and now; it prefers to dwell on what is absent,... on what has been or may be. If men are more punctual than women, it is because they know that, without the external discipline of clock time, they would never get anything done.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

In short, if there were external bodies, it is impossible we should ever come to know it; and if there were not, we might have the... very same reasons to think there were that we have now.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Although a firm swat could bring a recalcitrant child swiftly into line, the changes were usually external, lasting only as long a...s the swatter remained in view....Permanent transformation had to be internal....The habits of self discipline, as laborious and frustrating as they were to achieve, offered the only real possibility of keeping children safe from their own excesses as well as the omnipresent dangers of society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along? Can we get along? Can we stop making it, making it horrible for the ol...der people and the kids?A man cannot know himself better than by attending to the feelings of his heart and to his external actions, from which he may with tolerable certainty judge "what manner of person he is." I have therefore determined to keep a daily journal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by s...pitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A more equal, if threadbare illustration of the antithesis between humanism and the gospel of scientific progress is found, of cou...rse, in Montaigne and Bacon.... The sovereignty of man, says Bacon in one of his massive phrases, lieth hid in knowledge. Montaigne would agree, but his terms would have an entirely different meaning. Bacon means that through scientific knowledge man can conquer external nature for his own use and benefit. Montaigne would mean that through study of his own inner strength and weakness man can learn to conquer himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »